Title: Bowed Knees, Confessing Tongues and God Glorifying Lives
Text: Philippians 2:5-11
Thesis: Our devotion to Christ glorifies God the Father.
Introduction
Flash mobs have become popular ways for large groups of people to assemble suddenly in a public place to perform or protest for a brief time and then disperse. It is usually highly organized through some social media. Perhaps you have seen YouTube.com clips of flash mobs and their performance art.
October 30, 2010, more than six hundred Philadelphia-area singers circulated nonchalantly among the Saturday morning shoppers in the large Macy's store in downtown Philadelphia. Dressed in street clothes, the inconspicuous singers mingled with other shoppers. Then, at exactly noon, the organist at the mall's historic Wanamaker organ (the largest pipe organ in the world) began playing the opening measures to the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's Messiah.
Suddenly, the choir members, sprinkled throughout the store, started singing in full voice. The video for this event shows the amazed shoppers watching the choir giving glory to the "King of Kings and Lord of Lords."
On November 13, 2010, a similar "flash mob" performance took place in the food court of the Seaway Mall in Ontario, Canada. Shoppers who paused for a quick lunch were surprised by 80 singers from the nearby Chorus Niagara who started singing the "Hallelujah Chorus."
(Greg Asimakoupoulos, Mercer Island, Washington; source: Peter Dobrin, "Song for the Shoppers," The Philadelphia Inquirer, 10-31-2010)
These performances are stunningly beautiful and contagious events and something of a precursor of that day when the prophecy of our text is fulfilled when “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.”
However, we need not wait until that day to be people who bow the knee, confess with our lips and live lives that glorify God. For the people of God, living Christ honoring and God glorifying lives is the way we live.
We begin to live that out when we realize that is the purpose of our existence.
I. We exist for God, not God for us
“In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.” Hebrews 2:10
I want to lift from Hebrews 2:10 this statement about God. Everything exists through God and for God… It is God, “for whom and through whom everything exists.”
That is a powerful statement about who God is and the ultimate purpose for everything that exists. It means that God created and sustains everything that is and that everything that is, is for the sake or benefit or pleasure or purposes of God.
The Westminster Catechism asks, “What is the chief end of man?” And then answers, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” My sense is that while we may parrot the catechism with our mouths, in practice we believe God exists to meet our needs and make us happy.
When all is well there is little thought given to the purpose for our existence in relation to God, but when there is a need or a crisis, it is with great clarity that we surmise that God exists to help us. God exists to make my child well. God exists to supply all my needs. God exists to save my marriage. God exists to enlarge my sphere of influence and to empower me for the challenges and opportunities of life.
In reality the question is, “Why do we exist?” And the answer is, “We exist for God.”
I live in a community where there is a home owner’s association. The home owner’s association exists for the greater good of the community. For example, everyone who owns a home in our community is expected to respect the rights of the other homeowners. We all have a garage and one parking space. If you need additional parking space you need to use on street parking. Of course this is the second most ignored of community courtesies.
The most commonly ignored community courtesy is the failure of dog owners to picking up after their pets. While most probably are responsible pooper-picker-uppers… many are not.
I once heard a Seinfeld sketch in which Jerry Seinfeld pointed out that if we were being watched by alien life from outer space… they might rightly conclude that the dog is the superior species and man the lesser species given the fact that dog owner’s scurry around picking up their dog’s little deposits. The dog leads the person around with a leash. The dog makes a mess and the person on the other end of the leash picks it up. Who exists for whom? Does the dog exist for the person or does the person exist for the dog?
Does the tail wag the dog or does the dog wag the tail? We Americans like to think that the tail wags the dog. We, the public or the voting constituency, like to think of ourselves as the dog and we like to think that our government as the tail. When we think the government is getting a little too big for its britches and government controls seem excessive we say, “The tail is wagging the dog.”
God does not exist for the purpose of being wagged. We exist for God. And while it is true that we are objects of God’s love and devotion, God does not exist for us.
In fact, our lives are to be lived out as spiritual acts of devotion to God.
II. Our lives are to be spiritual acts of worship
“I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer you bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship.” Romans 12:2
The concept of living sacrifices is contrary to our understanding of sacrifices.
This week I received the January issue of National Geographic Magazine and read with interest the story of Cohokia - America’s Forgotten City. Today Cohokia is an historical site of about 4,000 acres east of St. Louis, MO in Illinois. Cohokia was a community with many flat-topped mounds. One mound they call the Grand Plaza is a handmade, flat-topped mesa about the size of 45 football fields. Archeologists and anthropologists believe this mound was used for community sporting events, feasts and religious celebrations.
Cohokia is likened to other communities or empires that flourished like the Incas or the Aztecs or the Anastasia here in Colorado. After hundreds of years, for reasons unknown to us, these communities were abandoned and died. They believe Cohokia was a ghost town by the time Columbus landed in the new world.
Among the many things they have learned about the people who lived in Cohokia is that they practiced ritual human sacrifice. Some of the remains they have found are believed to be victims of ritual sacrifice. These remains are of people who “died” as human sacrifices.
The bible does not speak of a God who desires ritual human sacrifices… God is not a God who is honored by the human dead. God is honored when human give their lives as “living” sacrifices to God… living for God rather than dying for God.
In 1969 Malcolm Muggeridge, a British journalist and the editor of Punch, a satirical magazine, went to Calcutta to make a documentary movie about Mother Teresa for the BBC. She didn't want to do it, but church leaders finally persuaded her. When she finally agreed, she said, "Let us do something beautiful for God."
Muggeridge, who was not a Christian at the time, later became a follower of Christ because of his relationship with Mother Teresa. And when the film of her work among the poorest of the poor in Calcutta was completed, Muggeridge used the phrase, “something beautiful for God” in the title.
Living out our lives as something beautiful for God is what it means to be living sacrifices for God.
The conscious intent of everything we do is that it glorify God.
III. Everything we do is supposed to glorify God
“So whatever you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” I Corinthians 10:31
Martin Luther was approached by a working man who wanted to know how he could serve God. Luther asked him, "What is your work now?" The man said, "I'm a shoemaker."
Much to the cobbler's surprise, Luther replied, "Then make good shoes and sell them at a fair price."
Luther didn't tell the man to make "Christian shoes." He didn't tell the man to leave his shoe business and become a monk.
Six months before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King spoke to a group of Jr. High School students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia and this is what he said: If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”
As Christians, we can faithfully serve God in a variety of vocations and jobs. And we don't need to justify that work in terms of its "spiritual" value or evangelistic usefulness. We simply do whatever we do to glorify God.
Simply stated: We all exist for the purpose of glorifying God in all of life.
Conclusion
In his book Don't Waste Your Life, John Piper recounts a story his father often told of his days as a fiery Baptist evangelist. It is the story of a man who came to saving faith in Jesus Christ near the end of his earthly existence. Piper writes:
The church had prayed for this man for decades. He was hard and resistant. But this time, for some reason, he showed up when my father was preaching. At the end of the service, during a hymn, to everyone's amazement he came and took my father's hand. They sat down together on the front pew of the church as the people were dismissed. God opened his heart to the Gospel of Christ, and he was saved from his sins and given eternal life. But that did not stop him from sobbing and saying, as the tears ran down his wrinkled face, "I've wasted it! I've wasted it!"
We can understand why the man felt that way and in that we all know what it is to fritter away opportunities. But in fact, when we consider the larger – eternal picture, the man had all of eternity to glorify God. What may have been lost temporally was not lost to eternity.
But on the other hand, we need not waste another moment of this life living in ways that do not honor God.
As we come to the Lord’s Table this morning… we come knowing: Christmas Communion is a time for receiving the mercy and grace of God and for the rededication of our lives to honor and glorify God in every expression of life.
